Reading with Patrick

Kuo writes about how, in her English class at Stars, silent reading became a sort of institution. She introduced books by Black authors who told stories to which she felt the children could relate. Despite the skepticism of her colleagues that these normally raucous children would read the books, let alone abide by a quiet period in which everyone would read, the students devoured the books that Kuo purchased and looked forward to their reading time.

Kuo also incorporates silent reading into the instruction that she provides Patrick when he’s in jail. Here, the exercise has an even more transformative power, due to it becoming the conduit through which Patrick can temporarily forget about the dehumanizing circumstances of his incarceration while understanding more about the social and historical contexts that helped create his situation.

Silent reading is symbolic of the transformative power of reading and the way in which language can give structure to the world in which we live. Kuo photographed her students at Stars to show them how they looked when they read—“[c]oncentrated, absorbed, and serious” (31). These adjectives are the opposite of how many of Kuo’s colleagues described the students and different, too, from how the students would have described themselves.